First Cell

Part of the definition of life, says David Deamer, is that it is in a place. Deamer is not uttering a koan in a Zen monastery. He’s sitting next to a microscope in a biology laboratory at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Deamer is a hard-core biophysicist, but still there is a monkish quality to him. It comes not just from his unnervingly gentle manner of speaking but from his entire approach to science. This is a man who, in contemplating the pattern of nucleotides in DNA--represented by the letters A, C, G, and T--was reminded of musical notation. By allowing the letters to stand for notes instead of nucleotides--and using E as the equivalent of T--he turned human DNA into hypnotic melodies, available now for your meditative pleasure on both tape and CD. Deamer himself likes to hum the insulin gene. This is a man who isolates ...